Thinking About the Future in the Present

I am growing up. As strange as it sounds to me, it is happening. Growing up has its pros and cons, like more freedom and the ability to spend time with friends without parental supervision. While these are nice, on the other hand, workload is increased, more responsibility is put on me, and I have to start thinking about what I want to be when I grow up. I'm not talking about, "I want to be a fireman!" or "I wanna be a superhero!" These are great ideas, don't get me wrong, but as I grow up, I began to see what actually matters in today's world.

I toyed around with many ideas. I could be a 3D designer, musician, runner, writer and various other professions related to passions that I have tried or that I have. After spending a great deal of time thinking about it, I decided that I wanted to do some type of engineering. I began to look around at my choices. I could be a biomedical engineer who works in the field of stem cell research, or I could be a computer engineer and contribute to the ever-growing field of electronics. Deciding now is super important to me and my parents, so that I can begin to gear more of my electives towards my wanted career.

The other night, my parents and I were eating were eating dinner at an Italian restaurant, and the topic of architectural engineering (aka architecture) was brought up. I began talking about how the Egyptians were so much more intelligent than people give them credit for. They figured out that you couldn't build just one slender monolith going straight up; otherwise it would be too weak to support itself. They learned that creating a large building requires that you first build a large base to support the whole building, and then work towards a single point where the building would be the tallest. These became known globally as the "Pyramids." I then talked about how similar principals are used in today's buildings, such as the Empire State Building. The Empire State Building has a large base that is just a little larger than the majority of the building, It then goes up as high as possible before losing stability, so then they made the next part smaller. It then goes up a few more flights, and then a dome that had more of a pyramid look to it caps it off. The skyscraper uses the same principals as the pyramids butmore advanced, with better materials and better understanding of gravity and the way the world works.

After I finished explaining this, I realized I had a new passion that I really wanted to pursue. I have always enjoyed the idea of designing things. I tried 3D modeling for game characters, and I'm still playing around with it. I had explored Sketchup in the seventh grade when we made a model of a strand of DNA. I had not even considered architecture a possibility.

I have many different types of engineering to choose from. I could be a chemical, aerospace, biomedical or computer engineer, but I ended up most interested in architecture. Architecture interests me because it is a mixture of physics, design, creativity, and longevity. A building cannot be created if it is not expected to last for a long period of time, so a lot of care, time and creativity goes into making a building. I feel that architecture would be a great career for me because it mixes a ton of my interests into one great field. While I would enjoy the other types of engineering, they do not fascinate me the same way that architecture does, but I am still trying to figure out what my passion is, because I am still young.